Capturing the GazeAnders Petersen

Transformation does not mean chaos. There is a main theme running throughout Petersen’s work, and whether it’s plain to see, or whether it goes under and reappears like the flow of a river, this moment—when people come together, when their gaze meet the photographers’—was already present in his earliest photographs taken at the Café Lehmitz in Hamburg. The gaze of the other, and our own, disappear as soon as we see it. Encountering the other in Petersen’s photographs is to not only capture their gaze, but to make it visible. Soho, Hamburg, Rome—decades separate these portraits. But no single moment is without the right approach, and the perfect gaze at the other and, accordingly, at oneself. “A portrait is when you can say, ‘That’s not just him. That’s also me.”